Status of Women committee  Thank you, and good afternoon. My name is Dr. Claire Crooks. I’m a board member of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Canada’s public foundation for women and girls. Thank you for inviting us to speak to you today. We work in three areas: helping low-income women move out of pove

Status of Women committee  There's obviously not a one-size-fits-all or only-one-time approach, but I think what we need to look at is what girls need at relevant developmental stages. Our research shows that between nine and thirteen, you just see this significant dip in confidence, in taking on leadershi

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. And you can look at it from different angles. From a basic needs point of view, one of our most fundamental human needs, obviously, is to be safe. You see this if you're working with women who are in shelters, for example. It's very hard for women who don't have saf

Status of Women committee  Right, it's individual donors.

Status of Women committee  Yes. In the past year, Status of Women Canada funded a particular piece of work that the Canadian Women's Foundation did, but typically we do not go after government funding, so it's individual donors and corporate sponsors.

Status of Women committee  Who is on our big money list? It's very wide-ranging. We have a tremendous group of volunteers right across the country. One of our biggest partners has been Rogers Media and Chatelaine, and all of their different offshoots. There's a range of banks and of different groups. We ha

Status of Women committee  Yes. One of our campaigns was “Women Moving Women”, and we found 2,500 women across the country to commit $2,500 over five years to help move another woman and her family out of poverty. So there are different campaigns.

Status of Women committee  Sure. Actually, I'd like to clarify one previous comment. If I put on my researcher hat, I certainly have not had access to $65 million in research funding. I think it's a bit unfair to compare the Canadian Women's Foundation with a research outfit, because—

Status of Women committee  You know, I think you're missing a piece, which is about the hypersexualization of girls. Girls that age aren't talking about not doing their math homework because they want to look pretty for a boy; they're talking about this massive pressure that is driven by multi-billion-doll

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. In my research role I'm involved with a program called the Fourth R, which has developed school-based prevention programming that's in 2,000 schools around the country. As well, I have a Public Health Agency of Canada innovation strategy grant to work with communities

Status of Women committee  Okay. Right.

Status of Women committee  Protective factors are the opposite of risk factors. What it means for a developmental researcher is that if you look at two groups of youth who have different outcomes of interest—adolescent girls who were successful in school versus those who weren't—you can identify risk facto

Status of Women committee  The part that the Canadian Women's Foundation does well is raise the money and identify the programs. It's the community partners and programs that really do the work. To go back to that example of the girls program in Fort McMurray, to echo what Ms. Stinson was saying, there's

Status of Women committee  Yes, I'm obviously familiar with Dr. Ungar's work in the centre there. Really, we're talking about the same thing: that protective factors lead to resilient outcomes. I think there are assets or resiliency factors or protective factors—whatever you want to call them—that operate

Status of Women committee  Yes, we do a lot of work on that. To go back to the question earlier on the role of feminist research, I would add to Ms. Stinson's comments, which I thought were excellent, and just say that a lot of people don't understand that research, especially quantitative research, isn'